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Tag: Security

By default, unRAID has a few pretty big security vulnerabilities which should be addressed immediately after installation.

My take is that unRAID is secure enough to operate within my home network behind a firewall, not exposed to the internet. Adding the steps here will make it more secure to protect against the unlikely, yet unfortunate possibility that someone nefarious gains access to your home network.

Here’s my list of steps taken to secure my unRAID install. If folks have more that I’m missing, I’d love to add them here!

Add password for root

It’s really bad that unRAID doesn’t force you to set a root user password as part of the installation. There’s really no excuse for this type ‘insecure by default’ philosophy when it’s so easy to fix.

So, to fix it yourself, go to the web UI and navigate to Users > Select ‘root’ > Add a Password.

It will take all of 30 seconds to do it.

Create users that aren’t root

It’s always a good idea to do as little as possible as the root account on a Linux system. While you’re on the Users screen, go ahead and make users for yourself and others you want to have access to shares. The only thing these users can do is access shares.

Restrict access to your shares

If you don’t have to expose a share via SMB, don’t! Just turn them off.

If you don’t have to give people write access, make them read only.

I prefer to set my shares that are available via SMB to “Private” for the Security level which gives guests no access, and then set the proper access control for each user in the house. To make the changes, just go through each share under the Shares tab and set your SMB Security Settings and User Access however you see fit.

Disable access to the /flash share

For some crazy reason, the USB drive that hosts the operating system is shared by default as /flash. I don’t remember if the default permissions on it are “Private” or not, but I think it’s a good idea to just not have it shared at all.

This one is trickier to find, however, because it’s not listed under the Shares tab. To find the controls, go to the Main tab, and click on the Flash drive link.

Go to Settings > SMB (Under Network Services). Under the SMB Extras add the following line text:

#disable SMB1 for security reasons
[global]
min protocol = SMB2

Disable Telnet & FTP access

unRAID comes with Telnet and FTP enabled by default. That’s really pretty silly this day and age. If you want to access a command prompt, you should use ssh. If you want to transfer files, use anything but FTP.

The easiest way to disable them both is to leverage the Tips & Tweaks plugin.

Install the Tips and Tweaks plugin by going to Plugins > Install Plugin and using the following URL:

Ransomware protection

I honestly don’t know if this plugin would help in the event of a ransomware attack, but I think the principle is sound and it’s a pretty low hassle way to add some protection. The recent WannaCry ransomware attack highlighted the need for some additional consideration for me.

The general idea is to create a honeypot of files and shared folders that, if modified, immediately trigger unRAID to go into read-only mode (and/or disable access to all shares). If someone tries to encrypt and delete your files, unRAID would simply cut off access. This is particularly useful since these shares can be accessed by all of your users on potentially vulnerable machines… so if one of their machines gets infected with randsomware, and it tries to access your unRAID shares (because those machines likely have the share passwords cached), unRAID can stop the attack from being completely successful.

Setup email notifications

This one is important so that you can be notified by the various plugins and unRAID itself about the condition of the server. This isn’t just about security, obviously, but also about the general health of the system.

For example, you’ll be notified about plugin and server updates which are available, hard drives that are too hot, errors that crop up, etc.

You can find the settings under the Settings tab > Notification Settings

Keep your server up to date

unRAID itself and all of the plugins are easy to update – just go to the Plugins tab and click the “Check for Updates” button. Then go through and update each plugin – including the unRAID OS itself.

If you run any Docker containers, unRAID will let you know if they have updates available as well on your dashboard (they’ll be a different color). For any VM you run, make sure to check for updates on them regularly as well.

Further Reading

There’s a good thread on the Lime Technologies forum – Is unRAID really unsecure? I would recommend reading that as well – there are some good pointers there about other basics not covered here, like making sure to keep your system up to date, maintaining good backups, etc.

My take is that unRAID is secure enough to operate within my home network behind a firewall, not exposed to the internet. Adding the steps above make it even more secure to protect against the unlikely, yet unfortunate possibility that someone nefarious gains access to your home network.

M and I have a great webcam setup for our home for the lil nugget – it’s a simple DLink webcam that costs less than $50. So much cheaper than an expensive, baby-specific monitor.

We use a tablet and our phones to check in on the baby using this great app (tinyCam Monitor Pro) – the best feature is that you can turn off your phone and still have the audio alert you to the baby starts making noise louder than the ambient room noise (i.e. squelch the volume & not have to listen all the time to the white noise we pump into the nugget’s ears to keep him happily asleep).

The problem is that we can’t view the webcam from outside the house securely. DLink provides an app that lets you view the camera when you’re not on your home WiFi, but it does so in an insecure way – basically broadcasting the video feed for anyone to intercept and see. That creeps me out.

So we needed a way to get secure access from our phones, anywhere in the world, back into our home network so we could see the camera. Well, need is a strong term… desire, perhaps.

This is what Virtual Private Networks (VPN) were built for – I’ll walk through how I set one up for our home.

This is a tech how-to. It’ll take an afternoon or a weekend to complete the project. It was a pain in the butt for me – I’m writing these instructions down in the hopes I can save someone else some time.